


you have no idea

by gloriousmonsters



Category: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Autistic!Nancy, Freddy being innocent of abuse but not of being a possessive asshole AU, Freddy not being as much as an asshole as he might, Gen, Nancy is in severe need of hugs, Suicide Attempt, actually implied Autistic!Freddy but I don't know if that came through, not from the person you'd expect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:26:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2781581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriousmonsters/pseuds/gloriousmonsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nancy has... something. It's not a guardian angel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you have no idea

**Author's Note:**

> So, I've had a number of headcanons knocking around my head. Finally a few of them-Nancy being autistic and having dreams about Freddy from a very early age, even if she didn't realize what they were being the main ones-combined into one plotbunny. In case you missed the tag, I usually write with the AU of Freddy being innocent of the original crimes he was killed for, but he's still a pretty messed-up guy.

Nancy couldn't tie her own shoes until she was seven. When she was six she had a deal with thin air; she would wait for her mom to look in the other direction, then stick out her un-tied shoe and not really look at the space in front of her. It was always empty, but not looking at it was an important part of the ritual. A few seconds later she'd put down one foot, stick out the other.  
  
By the time her mom looked back over, her shoes would be tied.  
  
She didn't know how it was done and didn't really care, and by the time she was seven she taught herself to do it and began convincing herself she'd always done it. Everyone else tied their own shoes, and the only invisible people she heard about were imaginary friends. Nancy knew, even as she tried to forget it had happened, that her deal had nothing to do with imaginary friends.  
  
~  
  
When Nancy was eleven her mother started laying down a lot of extra rules: don't rock, don't flap your hands, don't hum all the time... She told Nancy that if she followed these rules she would start making friends.  
  
No matter how rigidly Nancy kept her hands by her sides, people still thought she was weird. But her mother didn't want her to do it anyway, would purse her lips and shake her head whenever she caught Nancy fidgeting under the table or shifting from side to side; would say quiet hands, Nancy unless she stopped.  
  
The part of her that she's bottling up starts to spill over into pencils. She hasn't drawn since... she was little, and she can't remember when and what exactly, but something feels right about scribbling and scrawling until she's filled up the whole paper. Her mother finds her a set of colored pencils, and before two months are out she's worn the red and black down to tiny nubs that smudge her fingers when she uses them. As she turns twelve she reaches out to other colors by virtue of necessity; cool grey, chartreuse, teal and purple and everything else. Her mother tries to enroll her in an art class; she comes home early and methodically rips up the ugly, ugly exercises they made her do, and for once her mother gets the point. Art remains hers, and hers alone.  
  
It's around then the dreams start, as vague impressions of color and shape upon waking. She doesn't think anything of them, at first.  
  
~  
  
When Nancy is about to turn fourteen she steps onto the street, into the path of an oncoming truck. She'd already let a few smaller cars go by, worried that they'd stop when they saw her or they'd only leave her injured; she's sick and tired of everything, of school and her mother's disappointed stare and the pictures that will never turn out right, and she wants to be gone.  
  
She's just stepped into the middle of the street and stopped, eyes shut, heartbeat pounding in her ears, when something hits her. Not the truck--an impact in the middle of her chest, someone pushing her so hard she flies backward onto the sidewalk.  
  
Her elbows and hands are scraped bloody on the pavement and her whole side aches from the impact, but the doctor her mother insists on calling tells her that she's lucky, that she could have been hit by the truck. Nancy stays quiet, keeps her hands quiet and smiles until the doctor leaves and her mother lets her go to her room.  She strips off her shirt and examines the light bruise on her collarbone, and acknowledges to herself that there was nobody in sight when she was pushed.  
  
Googling tells her a lot about guardian angels, but none of it sounds quite right.  
  
~  
  
Nancy is fifteen when she tries to go to a party. Usually she'd sit up late to paint, but tonight she makes herself put aside her sketches and cap the bottles, promising herself that she'll return. One night, she decides, she'll be normal, act like the normal girls that liked going to parties and having fun.  
  
The party is too loud and too crowded, fraying her nerves within seconds; when somebody gives her a drink she downs it desperately, without thinking about the danger, because all she can think about is how alcohol might take the edge off the noise and lights. It's bitter and unpleasant and she can't stop almost panicking, so she finds herself a mostly unoccupied corner and curls up on a couch.  
  
She must have started dreaming, then, although afterward it was just a muddle of images, noises--there's hot air on her skin and a voice saying something, over and over again, in a room full of rusty reds and copper. Then the voice gets louder and someone's shouting at her to wake up, get up--and her face stings as if someone slapped it and she wakes up just as the boy bent over her is starting to fumble at her belt buckle.  
  
Nancy kicks him in the stomach, so hard he throws up a little and a lot of people go quiet, and she gets up and fixes her belt and shirt and walks, only swaying a little, out of the room and back home. (Somebody tries to stop her; she ignores them.) All the way back to her room she flaps her hands and snaps her fingers, shaking with anger and disgust, and when she reaches her room she scatters her tools across the floor and paints. The sun comes up on her with dark rings around her eyes and paint on her fingers.  
  
She falls asleep in class for the first time, and has vivid dreams that shred into nothing the moment she wakes up.  
  
~  
  
Nancy is seventeen and she's worked things out. She does her homework and her mom doesn't bug her; she keeps her head down and mostly avoids getting bullied; she perfects her vacant stare and wears a little too much eyeliner and nobody tries to be friends. She has her art and that's enough. She still freaks out sometimes but she can handle it, it's OK, as long as nobody sees her. And as long as she never looks directly at the thin air that should be empty, she's completely alone.  
  
Jesse Braun ruins everything. He sits next to her in class, and he wears too much black too, and he won't stop talking as if he expects her to answer, and he's funny and mean and gets hurt a lot more easily than he'll admit. He's under the impression she's cool, and it's really hard to rid him of that notion without talking to him.  
  
It's only when she starts speaking to him that she notices the--presence, for lack of a better word, has good nights and bad nights; good nights she gets some sleep, bad nights she's so jittery she can't lie down for a second because someone else's anxiety and anger are washing over her. She's studied her own emotions closely enough to know exactly when they're not fitting right. Still, she talks to Jesse; it's nice, to have someone think she's cool and 'different' and just a friend, because he's already got a beautiful girlfriend and all he really wants is someone to talk about death and his favorite music to.  
  
Even Kris begins to talk to her a little, clearly not sure what to make of her and trying to be nice. And finally, against her better judgement, Nancy lets herself be invited to a 'get-together' down at the nearest beach.  
  
It's a mistake, but not for the reason she thought it would be.  
  
It's a mistake because there's a bonfire, and she's standing within ten feet of it when a lighter is touched to the tall stack of wood, and when blue and green flames burst upward into the sky her whole body freezes and her heartbeat pounds in her ears. It's a mistake because fire brings fear over her like a flood until she can't do anything but gasp for breath, and Kris has to drive her home in the middle of the night and Nancy knows she's made herself look stupid again but she doesn't even care. She curls up on her bed and pulls her blankets around her as tightly as she can manage and cries until the fear washes out of her and she can fully understand it didn't belong to her.  
  
Research spits up a million possibilites at her feet; she's an empath, she had a twin who died in the womb, she's a hundred different kinds of crazy, she was burned at the stake in a past life. Guardian angels, the Internet reassures her, don't share anything but fuzzy positive feelings. But likewise, a dead twin or past-life memory was incapable of tying your shoes or pushing you out of the path of a car.  
  
Nancy keeps her head down again, and Jesse doesn't try too hard to talk to her.  
  
But she's not alone.  
  
~  
  
Nancy is almost eighteen and flaps her hands absently while she's plotting paintings; her mother doesn't like it, but Nancy is beginning to not care. She still keeps them quiet at school, and scribbles in the margins of her notebook instead; dreamscapes and ragged stripes, shaded so dark they wear the paper thin. There are good nights and bad, but she's learning to live on half-nights of sleep and ask empty air what it (he) thinks of her pictures.  
  
One evening, she Googles jobs outside of Springwood, and it cascades--buses, planes, empty apartments in other cities, she wants to know everything as long as it's not in her hometown. She realizes, then, that she wants to leave worse than she wants anything else.  
  
(Is it just her feeling that? Sometimes, now, her and the presence think so alike it's hard to tell.)  
  
Her mother tells her, gently and sweetly, that she wouldn't be able to get a job.  
  
She can't sleep that night; she feels restless and angry. But for once, she doesn't paint her nighttime dreams. With cobalt and cool grey and peacock green she outlines a city, gentle-colored and forgiving; tall skyscrapers against some distant sky. A dream for the future, one of the first she's had.  
  
Before the week's out she has to turn it to the wall to get a decent night's sleep, and she begins to feel the limits of the protection extended to her.  
  
Still--she makes a call, that week, to ask about a job. She likely won't get it, but it's a step forward, and she reasons with herself that things can't get much worse.  
  
~  
  
(Nancy is eighteen and she was so, so wrong.)


End file.
